Monday, January 7th 2019
Cooler Master Unclutters the PSU PCB with XG Series
Cooler Master this CES unveiled the XG-series Gold Advanced power-supply series. The company has re-imagined the various components that go into building a standards-compliant modern PC power-supply that's also feature rich in efficiency and protections. The XG series PCB gets rid of many of the components PSU designers would add as redundancies to compensate for lower quality, and switch to fewer but higher quality components. The company has also incorporated DC-to-DC switching to get rid of separate switching stages for lower voltage domains such as +5V and 3.3V. The new XG-series PSU PCB also features fewer but higher capacity wiring. The biggest dividend would be improved airflow within the PSU, which could be traded in for lower fan speeds and lower noise. Pictured below is a 750-Watt model compared to the PCB from one of Cooler Master's older generation 750 W 80 Plus Gold-level PSUs. Harsh steel alloy surfaces make way for lightweight acrylic panels held by steel frames. The company will launch this sometime in May.
15 Comments on Cooler Master Unclutters the PSU PCB with XG Series
Most of Corsair's PSUs are good build quality (The AX1600i is the best standard ATX PSU on the market that I'm aware of). From the looks of it I believe this is a Superflower design and not a Flex design, build quality looks great though.
Tangent but I've always wondered why they didn't put much bigger caps or supercaps on a PSU to have higher hold up times, almost like a pseudo-UPS just for 5 seconds or so for a graceful shutdown (RAM, caches, etc to not get errors, etc).
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Either way, good to see some innovation in the PSU space; it feels that there hasn't been anything really revolutionary in this market for a while, even though Seasonic is continually pushing the envelope little by little. I still hope to see a transition from ATX12V to ATX24V to allow for lower amperages, though.